Manhattan Associates Inc. (NASDAQ: MANH) today announced that France’s largest independent distributor of truck and automotive parts, Alliance Automotive Group France (AAG) will unleash the unified power of Manhattan Active® Warehouse Management Manhattan Active® Transportation Management at its latest state-of-art warehouse facility as part of a strategic initiative to expand its product range, improve customer service, reduce order processing times and cut its carbon footprint.
As a subsidiary of the world leader in the sector, Genuine Parts Company, AAG France supplies tens of thousands of regional repairers, through a network of 16 warehouses and more than 1000 shops, providing vehicle maintenance and repairs, spare parts, paint, PPE, workshop equipment and even tools. The ambition behind the roll-out of a new 50,000 m², state-of-art warehouse facility, south of Paris, is to showcase its operational excellence and provide a hub to serve the entire country.
“In a market where competition is so fierce and unrelenting, it is necessary to reinvent oneself constantly,” commented André Falbo, Transformation Director AAG France. “To support growth we recognised we needed to take our customer promise to the next level by increasing our product offering and cutting delivery times. We also understood the importance of minimizing our CO2 emissions and fuel consumption from an environmental perspective too.”
In order to cut processing and delivery times to under 24 hours, optimise packaging and route planning and reduce electricity, CO2 emissions and fuel consumption (linked to transport), AAG France turned to Manhattan Associates for its latest cloud-native warehouse and transport management solutions.
Falbo continued: “Manhattan was selected because it has proven capabilities supporting complex, high-volume, multi-channel processes in an automated environment with the likes of Exotec and a track record of success within the GPC Group across more than 40 installations globally. We expect to be able to reduce our CO2 emissions and fuel consumption linked to transport with Manhattan Active TM, while the Exotec system consumes 50% less energy than traditional automation systems.
“The maturity of the Manhattan’s technology and its roadmap, not to mention the attention to detail provided by the team during the proof-of-concept phases and its ability to seamlessly integrate with automation/robotisation specialists like Exotec were all important factors for us when deciding to unify our warehouse and transportation management offering,” finished Falbo.
Sebastien Lefebure, Managing Director for Southern Europe at Manhattan Associates, added: “The AAG France project is a unique opportunity to combine best-practice technology with the added dimension of social and environmental requirements – in particular a focus on the quality of working conditions and reduction of AAG France’s carbon footprint.
“Nevertheless, our unified approach to supply chain innovation and third-party integration provided by our cloud-native solutions and APIs meant that our solutions and team were the perfect fit. We look forward to the challenges ahead as we deploy across more of Europe in the future,” ended Lefebure.